In many situations it is desirable to impose usage constraints such as forced play-out on digital content. Forced play-out is a functionality that can e.g. be used to control that a user cannot skip certain advertising parts when watching a video clip, or other content. By ensuring this, advertisers may be willing to subsidize the cost of the content access.
The Open IPTV Forum standardization (OIPF) imposes certain requirements on this type of functionality. To fulfil these requirements, the Marlin Developer Community (MDC), which develops one of the content protection solutions that are recommended by OIPF, has created an extension to Marlin that is called the Dynamic Media Zones (DMZ) specification. OIPF is considering adopting a solution for forced play-out control that is based on Marlin DMZ. The DMZ solution is developed to be used together with the Marlin Digital Rights Management solution.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) refers to a range of access control technologies that can be used by e.g. hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. The term is used to describe any technology which controls uses of digital content and, in particular, restricts uses that were not desired or foreseen by the content provider.
However, there remains a need for a method and system for imposing usage constraints that is less dependent on any specific DRM system.